These really shitty no budget horror/sci-fi pictures from the 50s and 60s usually never had enough money to hire a full ensemble of characters. Well, this managed that feat except none of the actors are really notable except for Alan Hale Jr. but this came out a year before he was “The Skipper” on Gilligan’s Island.

The monster in this thing was literally a crawling hand. It was like Thing from The Addams Family except it was still attached to an arm that slowed it down and made it an even less effective monster.

The arm is all that’s left of an astronaut that exploded. However, the arm is possessed by a sinister alien. After a bunch of people are strangled to death by the alien possessed astro-arm, the town is saved by a hungry cat. I would’ve said “spoiler alert” but c’mon, I watch these things so you don’t have to.

The only real reason why this film even sees the light of day, five decades later, is that it was featured in the first season of Mystery Science Theater 3000 back in 1989.

The lighting in this movie is horrible, the acting is worse and the sound is pretty bad too. It is a visibly dark film but that was probably to obscure the monster in an effort to hide the effects, as it was obviously still attached to a human being for most scenes. They couldn’t pull this off with animatronics, as they didn’t quite exist in a really effective way in 1963. And whatever did exist would have cost money, which is something that this film didn’t have behind it.

This is a bad film but it isn’t so bad that watching it get riffed on MST3K isn’t a fun time. It certainly isn’t one of the worst films that was featured on that show. I rather enjoy that episode and this film being the focal point of it.

However, The Crawling Hand is most assuredly shit. And here at Cinespiria, we run these films through the trusty Cinespiria Shitometer. The results read, “Type 1 Stool: Separate hard lumps, like nuts (hard to pass).”